The Battle of Britain Five Months That Changed History, May—October 1940 by James Holland (z-lib.org).epub

Tommy was that should Britain be left to tackle the German air force on its
own, the chances of the RAF beating it seemed slim indeed.
Aged forty-five, diminutive and quietly spoken, Tommy had a goodhumoured
face and large, bushy eyebrows that lent him an air of
sagaciousness that was not without foundation. His background was naval –
from ships he had been transferred to airships in the Royal Navy Air
Service, and by the end of the last war found himself part of the newly
formed Royal Air Force. And although an experienced pilot, since 1925 he
had worked in intelligence, first under Boom Trenchard on the Middle East
section, and most recently as air attaché at the British Embassy in Ankara.
A naturally positive person, he would attend his daily Air Staff
meetings desperately trying to find something encouraging to say, but since
the start of the Norway campaign in April he had struggled to find ways to
lighten proceedings. ‘The meetings,’ he noted, ‘were conducted in an
atmosphere of unrelieved gloom.’ His job as Deputy Director of Air
Intelligence also meant a seat on the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) that
met daily as well, and whose task it was to provide daily intelligence
summaries for the Chiefs of Staff and War Cabinet as well as appreciations
of Germany’s probable intentions. As a member of the JIC, Tommy was
thus amongst the very few to know the true state of affairs. Now, he felt
more gloomy than ever. He simply could not see how the BEF could ever
be evacuated. ‘It looked,’ he noted, ‘as if the whole British field army, men,
guns, vehicles, ammunition, tanks, everything, would cease to exist.’
It was armed with the kind of intelligence that Tommy and his
colleagues were providing, combined with increasingly dire messages from
France, that the Prime Minister and his Cabinet had lurched into a new,
deeper level of crisis.
Saturday, 25 May, was another glorious day, ‘if,’ as Daidie Penna noted,
‘one really noticed the weather’. Certainly the Prime Minister and his senior
ministers had little opportunity to enjoy the early-summer sun. Weekends
had traditionally been sacrosanct and kept free of politics but not any more.
During the day, first at Cabinet, then at Chiefs of Staff meetings, and as
reports and messages arrived, and finally at the Defence Committee
meeting, it became increasingly clear that the French were not being
entirely straight with them. As General Dill’s report showed, Gort had kept
Blanchard informed of all his decisions, which made it seem clear that the
French had merely been looking for a pretext for cancelling the Weygand